Updated: Sunday, 22 Jan 2012, 11:37 AM CST
Published : Sunday, 22 Jan 2012, 8:43 AM CST
(NewsCore) - Joe Paterno, major-college football's all-time wins leader, died Sunday, according to a statement released by his family. He was 85. He had been undergoing treatment for lung cancer.
The man known by his Pennsylvania State University fans as JoePa will be remembered both for his legendary career leading one of his sport's top programs and for the abrupt way that career ended in November. Paterno was fired by Penn State's board of regents as part of the fallout from the arrest of former longtime Nittany Lions assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.
Paterno's 46 years in charge of Penn State's program, starting in 1966, earned him 409 victories, a pair of national titles, a statue in front of his team's home field and a spot in the College Football Hall of Fame. His ties to the school extended to 1950, when he started as an assistant there.
During his time in State College, Pa., he and his wife Sue donated an estimated $4 million to the university. His Nittany Lions were also held up as a rare marquee football program that won without ever having been found guilty of major violations by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, college sports' governing body. (The organization defines "major" violations as those involving acts that give a team a competitive or recruiting advantage.)
The story of Paterno's fast, involuntary exit from the school could not pose a starker contrast with his decades of success there. Sandusky, a longtime assistant of Paterno's, faces numerous felony counts of sexually abusing 10 boys over more than a decade. Sandusky has maintained that he is innocent of the charges.
Paterno was ousted because of the way he responded to learning of an alleged incident involving Sandusky and a child in 2002. Upon hearing of the incident from an eyewitness, Mike McQueary (then a young assistant on the Penn State staff), Paterno reported it to school officials but not to police, according to a report issued by the grand jury. Although Paterno was not charged in the case, he quickly came under widespread criticism for not doing more, though some prominent alumni have spoken out publicly against his abrupt dismissal.
For years, college football fans wondered how long Paterno would coach. Until the Sandusky case broke, Paterno still hadn't given any indication publicly when he would step down.
Born Dec. 21, 1926, Paterno, who was from Brooklyn, N.Y., went on to attend Brown University, where he played quarterback under coach Rip Engle. When Engle became coach at Penn State in 1950, Paterno -- who graduated that year -- joined him.
In those days, Penn State was a football backwater. The school, located in the sparsely populated center of the state, had never won a football national title and had played in only two postseason bowl games.
But the program improved under Engle and took off under Paterno, who became head coach in 1966. He led the Nittany Lions to an 11-0 record in his third season, its first football national championship in 1982 and another national title in 1986 -- defeating favored Miami in a famous No. 1-versus-No. 2 battle in the Fiesta Bowl.
In the process, Paterno turned Penn State into one of the best-known brands in American sports. Dressed for decades in basic blue-and-white uniforms with no names on the backs of their jerseys, the Nittany Lions became synonymous with old-school, fundamental football. Beaver Stadium, Penn State's home field, swelled to a seating capacity of over 100,000. Penn State began playing football in the Big Ten Conference in 1993, and Paterno led the Lions to a perfect season a year later.
Paterno's death occurred less than three months after his final game as coach.
Read more: Wall Street Journal
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